


Come to Rest

by MissjuliaMiriam



Category: Hades (Video Game 2018)
Genre: Backstory, Fluff, Gen, Kidfic, good parenting, this is the softest shit i have ever written in my LIFE
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:40:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28126257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MissjuliaMiriam/pseuds/MissjuliaMiriam
Summary: Unlike his brother, Thanatos dislikes naps, and he has an accomplice in escaping. However, his mother has learned a trick or two, even for dealing with a child who can teleport.
Relationships: Nyx & Thanatos (Hades Video Game), Nyx & Zagreus (Hades Video Game)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 95
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Come to Rest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [furiosity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/furiosity/gifts).



> I write fluff very rarely, but this is so FUCKING fluffy.
> 
> This is my first time doing Yuletide! And I am not... actually all that good at writing to prompts. However, I hope this satisfies--the prompt "what it was like for Nyx during Thanatos's 'real handful' childhood days when he presumably blinked around like a mad lad just to vex his mother" caught my attention, because oh my GOD that's cute. Definitely less chaos than I expected when I started, but I hope the soft makes up for it!
> 
> Happy holidays <3

Nyx smiles, looking around the central hall of the House of Hades. Hades himself is sitting at his desk doing all he can to focus on his paperwork, ignoring the faint sound of giggling issuing from his right.

“Now,” she says, pitching her voice to carry, “where beneath the earth could my son have gotten to?”

The giggling intensifies, and then a tiny voice says, “Shh!” and it hushes slightly.

“Nowhere in the House of Hades can I find my boy,” she sighs, still loudly. Hades, at his desk, rolls his eyes. “He has vanished from before my eyes, and now he is surely gone forever. Woe is me, that I could not capture him for his nap before he went away for all eternity!”

“Oh no,” whispers a voice, from somewhere in the long fur under Cerberus’s belly, where he’s laying half on his side. One of his heads is sleeping; the other two have tolerant looks on their faces. Nyx turns her own face away briefly to hide her smile.

Then, as dramatically as she can muster, she goes on. “I have searched high and low, all the way to the edges of the night, and still my child is missing! Alas! If only I had not driven him away with demands that he nap!”

There’s a little scuffle in the fur. She steps closer while the movement continues, her feet silent against the floor, then pauses when it seems the small ones are paying attention to her once again. “Hm,” she says, nice and loud. In harmony, Hades harrumphs. “Perhaps I should go and check the gardens again. I know that my son likes the gardens very much.”

“Ooh,” a voice whispers from Cerberus’s fur.

“Yes, that sounds like a good idea,” Nyx continues, and steps as loudly as she can away—still not very loudly, but the little divine ears buried in dog fur will still be able to hear. “I shall find my son out in the gardens, and then I will cuddle him forever and he shall never escape!”

Another tiny giggle, and a whispered, “Yes!” Nyx takes one more loud step, then reaches for the shadow of the flicker of a torch on the wall and goes to it. She appears on the other side of Cerberus, the two small boys hiding half-buried in his fur no long obscured from her vision, and both of them shriek.

“Run away!” shouts Zagreus, and then he fails to follow his own advice and instead leaps at Nyx’s legs, tackling her. Thanatos is wide-eyed and startled, and then a bell rings and he’s gone—again. Nyx laughs, shaking her head, and bends to sweep Zagreus up into her arms, already dancing fingers along his side to make him scream with laughter and writhe in her grasp. 

“Enabling the escape of my little Thanatos, hm?” she asks, in her best approximation of a forbidding tone. At the moment, it’s not very good. She does love these two a great deal, in truth. “Well, perhaps this son of mine as as good as the other, and instead I shall take him captive instead.”

“Nooooo!” Zagreus yells, still laughing. He wriggles again, but she has him in her grasp now, and unlike Thanatos he cannot slip between the folds of the world; his powers ground him, rather than preventing him from falling into anyone’s grip. “No, Mama Nyx, not me too!”

“Two sons are better than one,” she says firmly. “Three sons are even better, but Hypnos is a good boy who has gone easily for his nap, unlike you two delinquents.”

“Delinquents indeed,” Hades grumbles from his throne, but quietly enough that Zagreus does not hear past his own whining and giggling—for once. 

Nyx ignores her sullen housemate and instead carries Zagreus with her as she heads toward the bedroom. “Well, if Thanatos is so determined to escape that he would abandon you to your fate, I suppose I shall content myself with just you.”

“It’s not my naptime!” Zagreus argues. Technically true—he rises earlier and napped earlier. “Can’t make me!”

Nyx shrugs. “I’m your mother,” she says, which is true enough for the time being. “I certainly _can_ make you. And no one is coming to save you from the terrible fate of… _two naps_.”

She has pitched her voice to carry, and as they pass the garden entrance, there’s a small scuff of tiny feet. She smiles again, clutching Zagreus closer. Just another moment, she thinks. Into the hall toward the bedroom, which has served as a nursery for all of the children for these past years. Eventually, she thinks, it will become Zagreus’s bedchamber alone, to be shared only as he chooses, as the others that Nyx has birthed or fostered grow into themselves and take their places in their own domains, but for now it is a shared place of safety and rest, healing and learning. Two steps down the hallway, a bell rings somewhere distant once again, and then with a warcry Thanatos latches his hands around Zagreus’s legs and tries to drag him down out of Nyx’s arms. 

Zagreus wiggles, trying to assist his own liberation, but Nyx was prepared and she holds him tight with one arm, the other coming down to catch the back of Thanatos’s chiton. “Aha!” she says, once she has a grip on him. He’s teleported out of his own clothes before, of course, though not in some time—he’s grown enough to be embarrassed when caught unclothed by the shades in places that he shouldn’t be.

“No!” Thanatos cries, kicking. “Mama! Let Zag go! Not fair!”

“I will consider letting him go if you come quietly, _pais_ ,” she says, a little chiding. He whines and slumps, hanging from his grip on Zagreus’s legs. “None of that, now.”

“Naps are for _Hypnos_ ,” he tries to insist. “Not Thanatos!”

“Naps are for everyone,” she says. She shifts her grip on Zagreus and stoops to sweep Thanatos up too. Her boy is light and slim in her arms as he has ever been, lighter now even than he used to be, as light as she is. He will walk silently someday too, and perhaps even lay his feet above the ground; her son, her beautiful, graceful boy will be a power some day. “Even for Thanatos, who is not yet grown and needs his rest if he’s to be blinking here and there through the fabric of the House.”

“Mama…” Thanatos pouts at her. Near-deadly, that face. Good that she is immortal.

“You are tired, my little one.” She can feel the soft and hollow places in him where his power has been used up, just by holding him close. The darkness can be very full, but it is also good at knowing emptiness. He has worn himself out, playing games of chase with Zagreus, pestering Megaera and being pestered by Hypnos, ducking here and there to avoid Hades’s burning gaze while they pet Cerberus. A happy childhood, yes; a busy one, and one that requires frequent rest. “Come to bed, just for now.”

“Tired, Than?” Zagreus asks in his sweet voice. “You don’t have to play.”

“Zag wanted to,” Thanatos says. “So Thanatos will.”

“Later is okay,” Zagreus offers. Generous, kind child. His mother’s heart, Nyx thinks; her own heart hurts with it. She misses Persephone dearly, but is happy to nurture this remnant of her as best as she is able. 

“... Okay,” Thanatos says. They’ve reached the bedroom by now, and Hypnos in his sleep has turned the bedding into a nest. Still, there’s room enough for Nyx to bend and nestle Thanatos down into a curl of the covers, and he burrows down deeper, wrapping himself up to preserve the small warmth his body generates. Zagreus squirms again in Nyx’s arms and she lets him down this time, and as she suspected he would, he goes to Thanatos’s side and burrows in too, providing the heat that Thanatos cannot generate himself. 

“Sleep well, my babies,” Nyx says, smoothing a hand over Thanatos’s silk-soft silver hair. His eyes are already growing heavy. “Restore yourselves, so that you can cause more chaos when you rise.”

“‘Kay, mama,” Thanatos mumbles.

Zagreus blinks up at her. “Cause chaos?”

She laughs lightly, bends to kiss his forehead. He’s hot to the touch; she’s become used to it by now, though it scared her sometimes when he was tiny. She’d thought he would burn out like a lamp with too little oil, but he burns still. “When you and Thanatos are awake again, I will tell you a story or two of my parent. I think you would like them.”

Zagreus smiles, bright as starlight. Not his mother’s soft, gentle smile, no—and Hades never smiles, so Nyx cannot make that comparison. Perhaps this he somehow got from her. “Not gonna sleep,” he tells her.

“As you say.” She rises from the bed carefully—Thanatos is drifting off, under the sway of Zagreus’s comforting warmth and his brother’s nearness—and steps away. Zagreus turns into the pile of blankets and buries his face against Thanatos’s shoulder, tactile and easy as no one else in this House truly is. The two of them, so bright, so full of life and energy… Yes, there will be chaos when they wake again.

For now, though, there is peace.

**Author's Note:**

> For the record, "pais" is the Classical Greek for "son" (or more generically "male child"). I thought it would be cute.


End file.
